The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.
—Thomas Szasz
The man who sees two or three generations is like one who sits in the conjuror's booth at a fair and sees the tricks two or three times. They are meant to be seen only once.
—Arthur Schopenhauer
In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us.
—Peter Matthiessen
A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.
—Baltasar Gracián
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.
—Matsuo Basho
You must not think me necessarily foolish because I am facetious, nor will I consider you necessarily wise because you are grave.
—Sydney Smith
School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching. And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
—Ivan Illich
When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just—his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.
—John Steinbeck
How can one accept—let alone enjoy—aging in a culture where God is twenty-five; where advertisements are filled with twenty-somethings in halter tops and tight t-shirts, unless the ad is for a drug to treat incontinence, high blood pressure, or elevated cholesterol? What about the wisdom of age? What about endurance? What about the beauty of a face etched by years that were not always easy?
—Genie Zeiger
I am, and always have been, a revolutionary writer, because our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality is an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes, our power wielded by cowards and weaklings, and our honor false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons.
—George Bernard Shaw
A country can be judged by the quality of its proverbs.
—German Proverb
God has… ordered things that we may learn to bear one another's burdens; for there is no man without his faults, none without his burden. None is sufficient unto himself; none is wise in himself; therefore, we must support one another, comfort, help, teach, and advise one another.
—Thomas à Kempis
Once, perhaps, the God-intoxicated few could abscond to the wild frontiers, the forests, the desert places to keep alive the perennial wisdom that they harbored. But no longer. They must now become a political force or their tradition perishes. Soon enough, there will be no solitude left for the saints to roam but its air will shudder with a noise of great engines that drowns out all prayers.
—Theodore Roszak
Another possible source of guidance for teenagers is television, but television's message has always been that the need for truth, wisdom and world peace pales by comparison with the need for a toothpaste that offers whiter teeth *and* fresher breath.
—Dave Barry
That is the greatest fallacy, the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.
—Ernest Hemingway